Obviously, no one is raising Baldwin from the dead, but we now have maybe the next best thing: a book about Baldwin from Princeton African American studies professor Eddie Glaude Jr. The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has invoked him as a model he was the subject of a widely praised 2017 documentary and his novel If Beale Street Could Talk was adapted into a feature film in 2018. He had a rare combination of raw literary talent and intellectual honesty that made him uniquely equipped to communicate an alien reality to someone like me, a white kid growing up in the South.Īs it happens, Baldwin, who would have turned 96 this Sunday, has been in the news these past few years. I don’t know what the Black experience is like in America, but I can say that no writer made it as visceral or vivid for me as Baldwin. If I could bring back from the dead any American writer and ask them to describe the country they see today, it would be James Baldwin, the great 20th-century essayist and novelist.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |